Sometimes, despite the best efforts of those who would like to turn Lakewood and East Dallas into Plano, our neighborhood wins one.
The Dr Pepper plant is one of those victories.
Sometime this year, Dal-Mac will almost certainly sell the Dr Pepper building at Mockingbird and Greenville and stumble away from East Dallas with a skinned knee and an even bigger bruise on its corporate ego.
Its self-serving plans to build yet another strip shopping center will go unfulfilled, demonstrating to anyone who wants to pay attention to what happens when a greedy and arrogant developer underestimates the people who live in and around its development.
The Dr Pepper debate was never about saving the Dr Pepper building just to save it, or whether Dal-Mac should profit from its acquisition of one of the most hallowed landmarks in the City. This is Dallas, after all, not Berkeley, Calif.
The question was always whether neighborhood interests and historic preservation have any place in a real estate deal – and that’s a line of reasoning that Dal-Mac never seemed to understand.
Company officials rarely gave the impression they saw the Dr Pepper site as anything more than another piece of raw land, no different than a vacant tract in some distant suburb. That was as naive as it was conceited.
This is not undeveloped Collin County, where developers build things and people come after the things are built. In East Dallas, the people are already here, and we’re here because we like the things that are already here – like the Dr Pepper building.
That’s why, if it’s economically feasible, we want to save it, and why we’ll work with the developer to match the development with the neighborhood.
This is not asking too much. In some places, it’s even called good business.
In one respect, it’s hard to blame Dal-Mac for being so wool-gathered about its responsibilities to its neighbors. Neighborhood participation in planning real estate projects does not have a long history in East Dallas – or in the rest of the City, for that matter. But if it is a relatively new development, it has also been exceedingly noticeable.
If last year’s showdown at the North Dallas Movie Corral didn’t enlighten Dal-Mac about working with homeowners, all it had to do was to check out what Kroger was doing next door to the Dr Pepper building. That’s where Kroger demonstrated that large companies can be good neighbors.
Kroger came in almost two years ago, told residents what it was going to do, and said it was too bad if they didn’t like it.
That attitude did not last past a couple of spirited community gatherings, where Kroger had its consciousness raised. The company realized that it wasn’t going to get anything done by treating the neighborhood like a bunch of twerps.
Kroger discussed, negotiated and compromised – and that’s why it has an absolutely gorgeous, state-of-the-art grocery store just a bridge away from the Park Cities.
In fact, cynics my argue that it was the lure of the Park Cities that made Kroger so amenable to compromise, and that it never cared about the neighborhood at all. This may or may not be true, but that doesn’t seem as important as the results. So why quibble about motives?
Dal-Mac didn’t even come that close. Its corporate vision was blinded by the opportunity to build a strip center, lease it, and sell it for a quick and tidy profit. Worse yet, the company had the nerve to complain that residents – already surrounded by a dozen strip centers – didn’t appreciate its many efforts to save the Dr Pepper building.
In that respect, Dal-Mac officials were correct: We didn’t appreciate their efforts. There wasn’t much to appreciate.
